1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to product dispensing equipment and, more particularly, but not by way of limitation, to methods and an apparatus for generation, storage, and dispensing of a stored product in a product dispenser.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the areas of ice vending, either in-store or in a self-contained remote bagging unit, ice generation machines are placed on top of ice bagging machines disposed in an ambient environment to capture the ice product, and bag a predetermined portion of the ice dispensed by the ice generation device. While attempts have been made to remove water from the ice generation system, a fair amount of water finds its way into the bag. The setup still further includes a merchandiser disposed beneath the bagging machine to hold the sealed bags of ice.
Problems arise because the ice bags dropped into the merchandiser do not organize themselves upon falling into the merchandiser, and the merchandiser ends up in disarray. The water in the bag then freezes in whatever orientation the bag is laying, thereby forcing the store workers to reorganize the merchandiser and strike the frozen bags with a mallet to break up the frozen block. Occasionally, the customers break up the ice block on the lower threshold of the merchandiser doorway when they retrieve their bag of ice.
In remote bagger situations, large amounts of ice must be stored and agitated to prevent the ice awaiting bagging from freezing together. Once the ice commences freezing together, use of the agitator to break up the frozen together cubes, actually cracks, or crushes the ice cubes, and creates non-uniform cube shapes.
Still further, the vending of bulk ice down an exposed chute is by no means sanitary, because the chute is exposed to an ambient environment at a temperature range between below freezing to above one hundred degrees Fahrenheit, which most likely includes airborne microbes, mold, and the like.
Accordingly, an expandable ice generation, buffer storage, and dispensing system that produces sanitary product bags that contain minimal amounts of water, stores the bagged product in an orderly fashion, and dispenses the bagged product is desirable to ice dispensing corporations, owners of the dispensing points, and the customers desiring to purchase sanitary ice from a retail outlet.